Loss convergence in a causal Bayesian neural network of retail firm performance

Abstract

We extend the empirical results from the structural equation model (SEM) published in the paper Assortment Planning for Retail Buying, Retail Store Operations, and Firm Performance [1] by implementing the directed acyclic graph as a causal Bayesian neural network. Neural network convergence is shown to improve with the removal of the node with the weakest SEM path when variational inference is provided by perturbing weights with Flipout layers, while results from perturbing weights at the output with the Vadam optimizer are inconclusive.